Hi Eileen,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 6: I have an interest that is central to my identity. That is, what I do is an important part of who I am .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were NA, NA, and NA.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.
You said your top three talents were kinesthetic, analytic, and artistic / spatial.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to become an all-american .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Qualify for Super-Regionals .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said feel happy! .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Inefficiency .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I’m at practice, then I will be present .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in sports .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt vulnerable when receiving critical feedback, and vulnerable when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being lack of time .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel nostalgic .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| Openness leads to a correlation between interest and confusion |
| The Career Hypotheses Exercise!! I loved thinking about careers A/B/C |
| Goal fusion!!!! I do this in practice all of the time (sprinting now = winning later) but never had a name for it |
| WOOP! |
| Large leaps come after dips! (Time and performance graph) |
| When receiving feedback, manage your ego problems |
| Growth mindset = intelligence is flexible = desire to learn = embrace challenges = growth |
| Change your system! |
| good mentors are authoritative—both demanding and supportive |
| Team players make others better |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Krutin Devesh |
| Eileen, thank you for being my desk mate this semester. I’ve greatly enjoyed getting to know you and greatly appreciate your kindness when it comes to helping out with group projects. Our pair-and-share conversations have been one of my favorite parts about Grit Lab, and I’ve loved getting to talk about tennis, professional development, and everything in between. I still don’t know how you manage being a D1 athlete and one of the most diligent notetakers I know, but it is inspiring!
I’m glad I got to hear your discovery project since cooking is a skill I’m trying to learn, and hearing how you decided to use what you already know to develop your skills further. I appreciated hearing about what it takes to cook with kindness, and I hope I can use the practice methods you used to ensure I develop necessary cooking skills once I get off the meal plan next year. And, of course, I can’t complain about the baked treats you got for us. Thank you for showing us how to cook for ourselves sustainably. |
| Adam Tannenbaum |
| Eileen is an extremely caring and hard working person. Getting to know her over the course of this semester has been a pleasure. She described to us one time about how she used to be extremely quiet and is an introvert at heart. I'm proud of how she's evolved into the person she is now, not that I got to see it personally, but you can tell that she is a good friends to those she is close to. I feel so fortunate that I get to now include myself among her friends.
Eileen did her discovery project on cooking good food, on a budget, and not too much time. I appreciated this topic a little bit extra because I love good food, but personally don't cook very often. Watching her explore recipes over the course of the semester and get excited about what she was making next was a great journey to witness. Learning about the actual nutritional contents of what we eat also was impactful because I don't usually pay too much attention. As an athlete, she has to be much more aware of her consumption in order to achieve the highest athletic potential possible. |
| Caroline Keswin |
| I am so glad I was able to get to know Eileen this semester. Over the course of the semester, I learned that Eileen is an incredibly kind, supportive, and considerate person. She is always willing to listen, whether it’s about class content or simply about what you did over the weekend. My team was incredibly lucky to have been put in a group with Eileen and I hope we stay friends in the future.
I learned a lot from Eileen’s discovery project presentation. As someone who has tried to get into cooking but failed over and over again, it was really inspiring to see that it is more than possible to find time to learn how to cook as a college student (and as a D1 athlete!). I appreciated Eileen’s detailed and thoughtful approach to her cooking process (i.e., making detailed grocery lists, cooking with miscellaneous ingredients, etc.). And, clearly, the discovery project paid off because the cookies she brought for the class were incredible!
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.